Surrender and Making Friends With Your Feelings – Native A.

My name is Vernon Foster and I am a full-blooded Klamath Modoc Indian. The Klamoth Modoc people reside in the state of Oregon, so this is the state in which I was born. At a very early age since I was placed in various foster homes one One of the foster homes ended up to be in Minnesota, and I was with a Native family. That was my first introduction to the Native people because prior to that, the homes that I resided in were not Native people. They had no idea about the culture as well as myself at such a young age. So I basically had to discover being a Native person, and I did it through this Native family that took me in as a foster boy. They were involved with tradition and culture, and they would attend ceremonies. And being at the age I was at that time, 14, I really had no knowledge, no interest about Separating what a native life was compared to the life I had lived But I started attending the ceremonies with them basically from their request and it Seemed as though it just miraculously happened that I connected with What was being said? the songs that were being sung and And the men that were speaking and the way they spoke, I resonated with that. And from that moment on, I tried to make sure that if not the family, at least myself attended some sort of ceremony or gathering. And that was my introduction into the native world. Well, at that age, at 15, 14, these men and women, they were speaking, they were leaders. They were great leaders and I didn't realize that what I was listening to in these meetings was the birth of the American Indian Movement. Unlike a lot of other youth that were drawn toward youth activities, I was drawn toward the singing i was drawn to the language i was drawing to the ceremonies and eventually i was withdrawn to the politics of what i was hearing so at that time because the way i was uh brought up my self-esteem wasn't that great in fact i oftentimes look for a way out of life and it was that american indian movement i won't go into the story in depth but it was movement that that meeting that i attended was one that saved my life and ever since then i have dedicated my life to not just the american indians movement but to the spiritual path so at a very early age working and in living actually beside medicine men and women I started to learn native culture in a different way than I ever ever knew was possible I guess because my contact or my visual contact with native people has always been television and this was an opportunity to get first-hand experience from real native people in a real native setting and so at the age of 17 i went on my first vision quest and working with the medicine men at that time i learned many many things, many ceremonies and many ways on this spiritual road which eventually helped me overcome my depression, helped me overcome some of the battles I was facing in my own personal life. So as my life kind of progressed, I became an actor for many years in Hollywood and I eventually became a private investigator, keeping my background issues in the back of my mind. And what I went through, I got involved with the mental health program, went to college for psychology and family therapy, and that helped me to move into a professional career as a counselor, as a therapist. The difference was I was taking traditional concepts, traditional ideas and implementing them into the field of psychology. So where that really actually took me was to understand that Native people have always had a psychology but it was more traditional. You know, today's psychology, textbook psychology if you will, concentrates on the mind and the thought process. Whereas traditional psychology deals with the heart and the heart process, feelings and emotions and what that really means in the traditional content. So, I started to develop exercises, physical exercises that could be shared not just in our native community but also with the states and with federal programs. And from there, I kind of just started to work in the mental health field and found some programs, youth programs, adult programs dealing with addictions, dealing with social issues that we face today. In doing that it led me, I'm kind of jumping ahead here, it led to where my life is today. Prior to being here in Brazil I was traveling all throughout Europe and Japan and in different places of the world sharing not only the traditional concepts, philosophy, ideas of native people spirituality but how to implement those teachings into daily life. How we can overcome some of the obstacles that we face today. We're in a world that is faced with a magnitude of domestic violence, of addiction, of self-inflicted depressions. And what I've discovered just recently in the last 10 years, I started working with what I refer to as past cultural historic trauma. The seventh generation, a Native American concept deals with this and I've been able to take that seventh generation concept and begin to work on a healing process of our past generational historic trauma. Now, I've been around the world so I hear many people talking about past cultural traumas but in the sense that it becomes a blaming, a justification to blame our current issues, our current problems that we face today on our ancestry. Well some of that yes it does come from that but we have an opportunity to heal. We have an opportunity empty the bucket that has been handed down in the bucket we inherited with the pain and the sorrow of our past generations and I come to the conclusion that if we empty that bucket because we today have the means, we have the know-how, we have the knowledge, we had the wisdom and we have the tools to do it. So we empty that bucket of the past generations we can let our ancestors rest in peace and stop digging them up to blame our problems on them and we can live the happy life that they wish they could have lived because I look at those generations and I put it in a time frame I look what was happening in the period of time of my great-great grandmother and grandfather then I look at the time period what was happened during my grandmother and my grandfather's time and then I looked closer to my mother and my father and I see what was happening, what led to alcohol, those things. So when I start to empty that bucket as the seventh generation my ancestors, my relatives behind me can rest in peace and I can live the life that they probably wish that they could have lived. The reason it's important for me to empty the bucket using that concept is because now I have two daughters And emptying that bucket, I know exactly what my daughters are going to inherit. They're going to inherent the knowledge and the wisdom to deal with problems and situations in their life. And it's going to be carried on to my grandson and my granddaughters and my great-granddaughter and great- grandson who are not in this world yet. That is the seventh generation. Three generations behind us, three generations ahead of us And me at the top is the seventh generation. Soon I will step down and take my parents' place and my daughters will step into my place and be in the next seventh generation, for it rotates, it continues. So I've been able to work successively, I may add, working with psychologists, therapists, doctors, medical doctors. Because if we look at those fields, they are very intellectual fields. So I help them to understand what intuitive healing is. How we use the heart, how we can heal ourselves, how we can begin to heal the processes which has taken mankind eons to discover that he can heal himself. And so as we begin to implement our native teachings and our native ideas and concepts and philosophies into everyday society people begin to understand it's it's a very simple process the simple process is just living your life who you are and when i say that many people become their sickness they carry on the personality of their sickness so their sickness takes control of their life whether that sickness be some kind medical sickness or most importantly emotional sickness so a depressed person becomes so depressed so down that depression begins to dictate to them how to feel what to feel what to do how to do it and that person is inflicted by that listens the depression because myself I'm one of those examples let me give you a little quick story I was sitting in my flat and I was just minding my own business and I got a knock on the door and I opened the door and there's depression didn't say good morning didn't stay hello how you doing it just came in and it went all through my flat told me what to do went to do it how to do it and it did whatever it wanted and I let it and when it was finished with me it just got up and left didn't say thank you didn't say goodbye didn't see you later it just left a few weeks later went by another knock on the door I open it and there's depression depression standing there with the whole box full of groceries he goes into my kitchen takes everything I like to eat out and puts everything in the cupboard that he likes again took over my house and when he was finished left no thank you no goodbye no see you later a few months went by and i got knocked on the door and there's depression and he's holding a suitcase clothes and he goes to my closet takes out my bright colored shirts hangs up all his black clothes makes himself at home tells me what to do what to do it how to do it and i did it i did everything depression asked and then in the morning i was sitting at the table drinking coffee and depression came in i knew i knew what depression wanted me to do next but i already tried it it didn't work so i looked depression in the eyes and i said sit down we need to have a talk And depression came and sat down. And I said, listen, you're welcome to come here anytime you want. Anytime you want to come, you are welcome. But when you do, you have to follow my rules. And with that, depression stood up, looked at me and said, I respect you. I asked depression, why do you respect me? depression's answer, you stood up to me. And I looked at depression and I said, I respect you too because I know how much power you have. And with that, depression stood up, told me I am leaving and he left. A few weeks later, got a knock on the door. Depression standing there, looked at me. can I come in? And I said, sure, come on in. We sat down, we had a good cup of coffee. He helped me write a couple of good songs on my guitar. I looked at my watch and I said it's time for you to go. And depression stood up and it left. See that concept, that story is saying instead of Spending the years that we have fighting, pushing away our feelings, which is a part of us. Make friends with your feelings. Make allies with your feelings, not enemies. Because you're only fighting yourself. You're the only one that's going to end up with bruises. Not your feeling, not your emotion. That is a traditional concept, utilizing words, if you will, to fit into something that we deal with every day. People are depressed. People are angry. People are frustrated. People are jealous. People have hatred, rage. those are feelings and those are emotions they are a part of us they are attached to us so using these concepts i try to bring the teaching that it's time to surrender it's time to make friends with your feelings because making friends with their feelings you make friends with yourself that's just one of the many exercises that uh i've come up with that i've been able to share in circles and and um in different programs if you're coming to a retreat or a workshop work it work it do the work don't come expecting everything to be ready for you and enjoy that weekend and when it's over two weeks later you're back into your depressive state. You're back in to your emotional state. The ceremony should be with you. It should be in your heart. When you're at that ceremony, when you're at that workshop, that retreat, you should be putting it inside your heart so that you could take it into that other world because just like us Native people if If you're walking the spiritual road, you're working in two worlds. Put both feet in the intuitive world of ceremony, both feet and the intellectual world of society. The only difference is now you've taken that intuitive side of yourself and placed it in your heart and it's always there because there are some things that you can do in society that doesn't accommodate your spiritual path that you follow. You have to do it from the heart. So in final words, remember this important quote. I came up with this a few years ago. On this spiritual path, you must be willing to compromise your lifestyle to accommodate your spiritual path. But you must not be willing to compromise your spiritual paths to accommodate your lifestyle. If you are seeking something, you must give something and sometimes giving means giving tears sometimes giving a shout sometimes giving of yourself so in final i want to say for you that are viewing this remember to work your ceremony and remember the moment you were conceived in the womb of your mother you were given a beautiful spirit and sometimes when we come into this world people cover that beautiful spirit up sometimes we cover that beautiful Spirit up but that spirit it's like the sunshine no matter how dark the clouds are over us and we cannot see the Sun no matter how Dark things are over in our life and we cannot see that beautiful spirit that beautiful Spirit just like the The sunshine is still shining.